Friday 13 July 2007

General MacArthur on the War on Terror, 1957

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...."
While the subject has been broached:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
— H. L. Mencken

Wasn't it terrible how just when people were getting used to the end of the Cold War, right on cue up popped the next dreadful undefeatable threat?

2 comments:

Vince said...

Well we can thank the lucky stars, that it was not China that was picked on. If you remember it was on the cards.

Andrew said...

I vaguely remember, Vince, but I think instead China was given Most Favoured Nation status. Its time might yet come.